Idiographic and nomothetic

Idiographic and Nomothetic 

Idiographic

Idiographic is the idea that everyone is unique and we should not try to study humans as a whole. 

Idiographic explanations use case studies to support them as they do not want to generalise laws to other people.

This gives qualitative data and is very subjective.

Evaluation of Idiographic:

A strength of idiographic research is that it gives you an in-depth insight into human behaviour which allows us to get a better understanding of the causes of their behaviour.

However, an issue is that this in-depth research can only account for one person so cannot be generalised to other people because it is not representative so the behaviour may be unique to that one person in the case study.

This also leads problems with not being able to create a theory due to it only being based on one persona there is not enough research.

Another problem is that it is not scientific due to its subjective manner

.A strength of Idiographic approach is that it can be used to support or contradict…